What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2025-53627: Meshtastic firmware allows forged DMs with no PKC to show up as encrypted
- Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: yes
- Published: 2025-12-29 · updated 2026-10-07
- Weakness: CWE-1287
Description
Meshtastic is an open source mesh networking solution. The Meshtastic firmware (starting from version 2.5) introduces asymmetric encryption (PKI) for direct messages, but when the `pki_encrypted` flag is missing, the firmware silently falls back to legacy AES-256-CTR channel encryption. This was an intentional decision to maintain backwards compatibility. However, the end-user applications, like Web app, iOS/Android app, and applications built on top of Meshtastic using the SDK, did not have a way to differentiate between end-to-end encrypted DMs and the legacy DMs. This creates a downgrade attack path where adversaries who know a shared channel key can craft and inject spoofed direct messages that are displayed as if they were PKC encrypted. Users are not given any feedback of whether a direct message was decrypted with PKI or with legacy symmetric encryption, undermining the expected security guarantees of the PKI rollout. Version 2.7.15 fixes this issue.
Affected products
- meshtastic firmware: from 2.5.0 before 2.7.15 — fixed in 2.7.15
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: meshtastic firmware 2.7.15. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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